Montgomery’s Truck Stop (1587 North Glenstone Avenue) sat at the northwest corner of Division Street and Glenstone Avenue in Springfield, Missouri. A poorly maintained asphalt parking lot surrounded the light-colored brick building. Some friends and I visited this dingy hole-in-the-wall weekly for a while in college and spent hours “doing homework” and solving the problems of the world.

An image of the building that was previously the home of Montgomery
s Truck Stop. Image obtained from Google Maps Street View.

It was a 24-hour restaurant with just one section – smoking. The ambiance of this hang-out left much to be desired, but it was perfect for a group of broke, underage college kids looking for a place to go. The drop ceiling tiles were yellow from decades of nicotine deposits. The corners contained cobwebs thick with dust. The patrons had their own stories to tell – the single mom who waited tables at night after working another job all day, the retired couple with matching long pale leather coats and bouffant hairstyles, the group of 60-something men who gathered for a cup of coffee and to shoot the shit.

Montgomery’s served $5.95 steak and eggs that we smothered in Country Bob’s steak sauce. I was too young and ignorant to realized that we smothered it in Country Bob’s because the steak wasn’t very good. I am not even sure it was really steak.

We arrived at the same time on the same night every week and sat at the booth in the far back left side of the dining area. We spread our books across the table and then spent the next several hours ignoring them as we ate breakfast food, drank soda and coffee, and talked like college students who thought they were being deep but were really just full of crap. We laughed, ate bad food, and enjoyed our youth in a way we didn’t quite comprehend at the time.

As it always does, life changed. I moved into an apartment by myself. Our class and work schedules shifted. I didn’t see that group of friends as much anymore. We drifted apart and our time gathering at Montgomery’s ended. In 2003, Springfield passed an ordinance that banned indoor smoking, which greatly impacted the regulars at Montgomery’s. Eventually, the restaurant closed. I visited Montgomery’s once after the smoking ban went into effect. The restaurant wasn’t the same. It was brighter and the people weren’t as interesting to watch. I wasn’t the same either.

The building is now occupied by a Carriage House restaurant, though you can still see the old lettering for “Montgomery” on the upper right side of the building. The parking lot has been refinished and contains fewer potholes. I have no idea if they provide Country Bob’s steak sauce to patrons.

Things change over time. Even if physical locations remain the same, temporal locations constantly change because time is always marching on. We change too (hopefully). We no longer have the same perspective on the world or the people and places of our youth. The world we see is different because the lens we view it through is different. We can never go back to our college hangouts, childhood playgrounds, or places of comfort once enough change has occurred. They are lost to time but archived in our memories and our hearts.

 

Thomas Wolfe quote obtained from Goodreads. Image created using Canva.